Men drink more, are more likely to binge drink and are almost four times more likely to develop alcohol use disorder than women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Yet when it comes to diagnosing babies born with birth defects associated with alcohol consumption, such as fetal alcohol syndrome, historically only the mother’s drinking habits are taken into consideration.
Research clearly shows that sperm carry a vast amount of epigenetic information—meaning heritable shifts in the way genes are expressed that don’t result from changes in the DNA sequence—that strongly influences fetal development and child health. Yet most doctors and other health care providers do not take into account the influence of paternal health and lifestyle choices on child development.
I am a developmental physiologist, and my research explores the ways that male drinking affects fetal development.
While most of the attention is given to the mom’s drinking while pregnant, my team and I focus on male drinking in the weeks and months before conception. Our studies are the first to demonstrate that male drinking before pregnancy is a plausible yet completely unexamined factor in the development of alcohol-related craniofacial abnormalities and growth deficiencies.
The intense focus on mom
In 1981, the U.S. surgeon general issued a public health warning that alcohol use by women during pregnancy was the cause of physical and mental birth defects in children.
